It would seem that Hollywood has discovered Africa… Again. But this time is somewhat different from the previous times. This time, inspired by the financial success of Marvel’s Black Panther in 2018, the studio executives decided they could take a chance on movies that paint a positive picture of Africa, and for Hollywood, apparently “positive” means movies about African kings and queens who kick ass and take names such as Gina Prince-Bythewood’s The Woman King (2022), Beyonce’s Black is King (2020), and Jada Pinkett Smith’s two African Queens series on Netflix (2023)—first Njinga (February 2023) and next Cleopatra (May 2023). We might place these historic queens alongside some other recent Netflix-Africa co-productions such as Queen Sono (2020) and Country Queen (2022). These movies and television shows differ significantly from the previous century of racist Hollywood cinema ranging from King Kong, Tarzan, and King Solomon’s Mines at the beginning of the 20th century to Blood Diamond and Captain Philips at the beginning of the 21st century, in which the Black characters rarely spoke and African space was a heart of darkness, corruption, poverty, barbarism, violence, jungle, etc., unless it was loquacious cartoon animals. The new movies aim to overturn the old racist characterization and have the potential to offer global movie audiences a sense of Africa’s rich and complicated past.
However, they are still Hollywood, and so, as you might already know, or at least expect, they have been debated all over the place, including here in Africa Is a Country, which has already published perceptive analysis of the shows Njinga and Cleopatra as well as three pieces about Beyonce [here], [here], and [here]. As Khanya Mtshali put it so well in her article last year for Africa Is a Country, criticism of The Woman King pointed out that the Afro-positive and feminist celebration of queens missed the ways in which those kings and queens participated in the transatlantic slave trade. Indeed, if you haven’t seen the movie Woman King yet, when you do, you will soon notice that the movie portrays the all-female Agojie army of Dahomoy as a progressive force for liberation against the sinister slave-trading Oyo Empire, while relegating Dahomy’s own slave-raiding activities to the background. In this way, both The Woman King and Njinga authenticate themselves in historical reference as a “true story,” at the same time that they cover up that history with wishful thinking and fantasy. Viola Davis, Gina Prince-Bythewood, and the writers of Woman King all admitted in interviews that although they were attempting to make a movie that addressed a historical fact, they did so through the marketable genre of an epic hero film. Or, as they put it, their intention was to make a black woman’s Braveheart, starring American actress Davis rather than Australian actor Mel Gibson.
My own question for all of these conversations about the new American movies and shows about Africa’s past is this: where is the history of African cinema? I’m interested specifically in how we can compare American-made movies such as The Woman King and African Queens: Njinga that explicitly aim to tell the history of the transatlantic slave trade from an African perspective to a previous generation of African-made movies on the same topic. In her article for Africa Is a Country, Mtshali raised the speculative question of whether it would be possible to make a more historically accurate film about the Agojie or the topic of Africa’s role in the slave trade, because such a film might be too painful. One might further ask how an African filmmaker would have handled such a topic. But we actually don’t have to speculate. The films already exist. Although some of these films are highly regarded by film historians for their innovative aesthetics and dramatic vision, they are nevertheless little known to the general public and unfortunately difficult to access.
Starting in the 1970s, a pioneering generation of African filmmakers from Nigeria, Ghana, Ethiopia, Senegal, and Mauritania made several important and influential films about the history of transatlantic slavery. Those dramatic fictional films are, in chronological order: Ceddo (directed by Ousmane Sembene, Senegal, 1977), A Deusa Negra/Black Goddess (directed by Ola Balogun, Nigeria, 1978), West Indies: the Fugitive Slaves of Liberty (directed by Med Hondo, Mauritania, 1979), and Sankofa (directed by Haile Gerima, Ethiopia and Ghana, 1993).
These films belonged to a self-consciously pan-African film movement that participated in conversations about anti-colonial politics, debated the challenges of nation-building, and attempted to answer the question of transnational forms of Black solidarity. Moreover, reflecting the diversity of perspectives on pan-Africanism and the question of slavery, the essay film I Is a Long Memoried Woman (directed by Frances-Anne Solomon, Trinidad, 1990), which creatively adapted the poetry by Guyanese writer Grace Nichols, can be read as a feminist counterpoint to the above list of films directed by men. In addition to the films about the transatlantic trade and the relationship between Africa and the Americas, there is also a film about the trans-Sahara trade: Shaihu Umar (directed by Adamu Halilu, Nigeria, 1976). Compared to films about the transatlantic trade, such films about trans-Saraha commerce complicate and decenter the Eurocentric historical metanarrative about slavery. Also, produced a decade later by a younger generation of filmmakers, John Akomfrah’s Testament (Ghana, 1988) explores the relationship between post-colonial Ghana and the legacy of slavery. In doing so, it also meditates retrospectively on the successes and failures of pan-African political ideals that had held such promise in the 1960s and 1970s for African and African diaspora filmmakers such as Sembene, Hondo, Balogun, and Gerima.
How do we compare and contrast these films with the new Hollywood fare? We might begin with the fact that The Woman King, a movie based in history, was inspired by Black Panther, as explicitly noted in interviews by producers of Woman King. What is interesting is that this inspiration is not one-directional. In actress Lupita N’yongo’s brilliant documentary Warrior Women (2019) for the Smithsonian Channel about the Agojie women warriors of the Dahomy Kingdom, she observes that it is quite probable that the fantastic women’s army in the Black Panther comic books and movies, the Dora Milaje, was itself inspired by the histories of the Dahomy and Ndongo states, the subjects of The Woman King and Njinga. If you’re looking for a more thoughtful, emotionally complex, and historically accurate sense of this history, I’d recommend watching N’yongo’s film. As she speculates, the connections between these stories indicate the ways in which the narratives of fantasy and history cycle through each other across the centuries. It is remarkable how much our sense of history and our sense of fantasy blend together. Beyonce’s Black Is King is the perfect example of this—a gorgeously Afrofuturist and Afropolitan mixing of iconography from history with the future-oriented and globally minded creative work of present-day African artists and a Disney story-line.
Nevertheless, the obvious question persists. Is it not significant that the new movies were green-lit by Hollywood executives in part due to the success of a Marvel super-hero comic book written by a white man? Significant, because the manner in which The Woman King represents history made it the subject of debate. On the one hand, one might appreciate these movies for finally offering a heroic African past, but on the other hand also experience some discomfort watching idealized portraits of kings and queens that sidestep the historical fact that they were partly responsible for the enslavement of thousands of people. Just as some social media critics speculate that Woman King was left out of the Academy Awards because of the Academy’s racism, others suggest it was fear of a critical backlash over its problematic representation of history.
What I don’t intend in this article is to take a definitive side on that debate. Rather, what I want to point out is the fact that what is totally missing from the debate about these movies and shows is any acknowledgment of—or comparison to—the movies made by Africans on the topic of slavery. How might we re-think this conversation about the representation of the transatlantic slave trade in dramatic film and television if we centered African filmmakers, liberated from the shackles of Hollywood’s commercial logic?
Taken together as a body of work, the filmmakers Akomfrah, Balogun, Gerima, Halilu, Hondo, Sembene, and Solomon present an alternative to the Hollywood and Hollywood-style movies about the history of slavery. I don’t have time to go into detail about the content and contexts of these films. That is the topic of another essay titled “African Cinema on American Slavery” forthcoming in the book Early America and the Modern Imagination: Rewriting the Past in the Present, edited by Patrick Erben and Rebecca Harrison for Edinburgh University Press. In that much longer essay, I describe all the films in depth in relation to the historical context of postcolonial nation-building and pan-Africanist film theory. Here, I will briefly touch on one example.
Sembene’s classic film Ceddo (1977) offers us an Africa-centered view of the transatlantic slave trade. Historians might be reminded of work such as John Thornton’s Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World (1992) about the economies of Africa at the time of the initial contact with Europe and what happened to these economies (including slavery) before and during the transatlantic trade. Thornton’s study maps the different African empires…